Bacon: The New Brain Food?
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- If you're pregnant and have a craving for bacon and eggs, you've finally got an excuse. A team of University of North Carolina researchers has shown that choline plays a critical role in helping fetal brains develop regions associated with memory. Meats, including pork, and chicken eggs are rich in choline.
"Our study in mice indicates that the diet of a pregnant mother, especially choline in that diet, can change the epigenetic switches that control brain development in the fetus" Steven Zeisel, the senior scientist involved in the work was quoted as saying. "Understanding more about how diet modifies our genes could be very important for assuring optimal development."
Zeisel and colleagues fed two groups of pregnant mice different diets during the window of time when a fetus develops its hippocampus, that part of the brain responsible for memory. The first group received no choline while the other received choline. The group that received no choline had changes in epigenetic marks on the proteins that wrap genes in cells responsible for the creation of new brain cells (neural progenitor cells).
By isolating these cells from the developing brains and growing them in cell culture, the scientists determined the expression of genes for two proteins that regulate neuronal cell creation and maturation. These two proteins were changed in the brains of fetuses whose mothers were fed low choline diets.
"We may never be able to call bacon a health food with a straight face, but the emerging field of epigenetics is already making us rethink those things that we consider healthful and unhealthful," Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of the FASEB Journal, was quoted as saying. "This is yet another example showing that good prenatal nutrition is vitally important throughout a child's entire lifetime."
SOURCE: FASEB Journal, January, 2010
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